Five workers at the Ohio Department of Mental Health spent part of some work days surfing the Internet for porn.

A state prisons intern sent her dad, a village prosecutor, a confidential report on an ex-convict he was preparing to prosecute. She also emailed gory crime-scene photos to a friend, a parole officer.

In separate cases, two state employees falsified inspection reports on preschools and day-care centers that they never even visited.

And, in the space of 13 months, two prison employees in a relationship spent literally a month on the phone talking to each other while on the job.

There also were side jobs on state time, misuse of state cars, falsified time sheets, fraud, theft, “free” lodging at state parks, mismanagement of grants and throwing files with state clients’ personal information into a dumpster.

Ohioans, though, never learned of these misdeeds — and dozens of others — committed at their expense. They didn’t know because the state inspector general doesn’t publicly release three-fourths of his office’s investigative reports.

The reports are not posted online or otherwise brought to the attention of the public and news media — that’s reserved for the one-fourth of cases that Inspector General Randall J. Meyer considers significant or newsworthy.

Since 2011, only 84 of the 357 reports completed by Meyer’s staff have been posted to the inspector general’s website.

Another report that was not released: A Department of Taxation employee, in a failed bid to save his job and others, nearly doubled the actual number of visitors to seven walk-in service centers that later were closed, leading to misleading testimony by taxation employees before the General Assembly.

“It’s shocking,” said Catherine Turcer, a policy analyst for Common Cause Ohio, a good-government group. “They need to release them to the public. We need these cautionary tales so state workers know they will be held accountable.”

Carl Enslen, a deputy inspector general and Meyer’s spokesman, said all of the investigations are public records. “We don’t advertise the fact every report has been completed. However, they are available to those who want to look.

“The decision as to whether or not they need to be advertised on the Internet is at the discretion of the inspector general,” he said. Thomas P. Charles, Meyer’s predecessor from 1998 to 2010, also did not release all of his investigations.

Enslen said some investigations are not newsworthy because “they do not yield any results of great public interest.” A Dispatch review of never-released reports, though, found “newsy” examples of wasted and stolen taxpayer dollars.

Other reports are not flagged to the public’s attention because of concerns about fairness, he said. Last year, wrongdoing was found in 52 percent of cases; the remainder were deemed unsubstantiated.

“In some instances, there might be people who have been accused of doing something wrong, yet nothing was found. Sometimes, accusations can be punitive” and should not be “broadcast” on the Internet to potentially smear a person’s name, Enslen said.

Turcer said transparency should triumph. “It’s horrifying to think they would not release information because of the people they perceive to be innocent,” she said.

“We don’t want to smear people or give them a bad name, but if they actually participated in misdeeds, we need to know about it.”

Selected unpublicized reports from the inspector general’s office may be view by clicking on the links in the left side of the page. The reports will open as PDFs.